Pressburger is the least predictable of writers, as he makes clear in his previous books, The Law of White Spaces and Teeth and Spies. That said, it is safe to expect that even at his most strange, he is invariably sophisticated, formal and rather mannered. The disappointing title story is also the opening one of this odd half-dozen and it quickly settles into a clever philosophical debate that develops between four rabbis attempting to climb a mountain. They are unlikely mountaineers and while the story becomes a tragedy, it is less tragic than Pressburger intended. The second story is also quickly undermined by its cleverness. Yet as it gathers momentum, it also acquires hints of a compelling strangeness, falling slightly short of its target. By the third story this politely offbeat Hungarian who writes in Italian is clearly warming up and an obsessive undercurrent is beginning to bubble.
Philosophy and obsession are his themes. Some of his characters are as weird as only the very normal can be. They are linked by having once been classmates; it is a thesis that Pressburger risks pushing to exhaustion. But at about the same time as the reader is beginning to be irritated by the coolly bizarre tone of these confessional, unmistakeably European stories, they also begin to assert themselves as psychological extravaganzas. Make no mistake, this collection repels and fascinates in equal measures. By the fifth story, "Victim and Murderer", a disturbed man is writing to a former schoolmate, now a successful doctor, with details of an experience that has, he writes, "marked my life, as the great events of history do those who live through them." The narrator describes the effect his twin brother's death has had on him. His mourning brings him back to the graveyard. There he discovers a dead kitten. Then a second and a third, all battered to death. There is a fourth victim. It, however, is still alive. The narrator brings it home.
From this point, the story - and indeed the book - acquires a Kafkaesque urgency. The kitten's battle for life becomes a frightening metaphor for something else as the reader is drawn into the narrator's terror. The next and longest story, "Message for the Century", is wonderful. Kafka meets Dostoyevsky through a crippled narrator whose life has been ruined since birth. As with the previous story, the narrator sees his life in universal as well as personal terms. Early in the story the vengeful narrator destroys his mother, then his father, while pursuing a series of mad obsessions. It is a dazzling performance, sustained by violent, manic humour and the heart and climax of an original, almost freakish collection. Pressburger is more concerned with chaotic states of mind than happenings - his stories, even at their most grotesquely comic, as in "Message for the Century", are philosophical and moral excursions, not entertainments.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
